Category: Sunday Poem

Weekly Write: “49 years of bargaining” by Scott Ferry

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Featured Writers, Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

49 years of bargaining

8: I don’t believe in Santa Claus anymore, so why
should I believe in you? Old man with a white beard
holding a stick. One has a red coat, one has a golden coat.
I know my dad doesn’t think you are real.
Are you also the God of aliens? Of dolphins?

12: I will have better luck in a swim race if I do good things,
like pick up gum wrappers, discarded A & W cans
on the pool deck before the race. I don’t care
if people think I am weird if it makes me go faster.
God, that race did not feel different, it felt terrible.
I did those things and I didn’t better my time. Where did I get
the idea that God rewards good deeds? I’m never doing that again.

17: There has to be something more
than just praying to get things. Everyone
is so focused on their chicken sandwiches, or their car’s new rims,
or their Ivy Leagues. I am rarely lucky and I have to grind
my ass off in the pool to get a scholarship and maintain a 4.0
and try to ask out Katy but I know she doesn’t like me
because I look like I am 14. I roll the rock up…

18: The sky is clicking and the incense tastes
like lemon lavender and the asphalt ripples under my legs.
How do I speak with this LSD silvering my sinuses?
When do the doors open to see the Grateful Dead?
The sky blooms inside veins and cherry stems pulse.
Someone looks at me and she looks like God with echo pupils.
I was wrong. Every molecule springs with words.

21: I can’t have a baby now. Please, whatever Old Man
with whatever robe. Forgive me. I am going to ask her to end it.
I will have to find money. She cries, I harden and dry in the parking lot
next to her car. I know people do this. I never thought I would be one.
Now I have something to cut off my body to repay.
I bury my reasons for praying. I promise nothing.
I blame and remember, even though I leave myself for a while.

24: Father, you are going. Where? I saw you deflate
as I gripped your shoulder. Your presence around me
deafens the blinking machines and crow-call alarms.
Let him go, nurses. Let him go to wherever he is going.
He rejoins where nothing can be broken.

28: I have tried to open every image for my students
by reading novels out loud, by using all of my light
to shine out until, Lord, my liver and lungs and kidneys
lie empty as damp shells and my hands shake.
This is not why I came here, is it?

35: My wife cheated on me
and I have been a good husband and she loves someone else.
God damn you! Why did I love and waste years?
We did laugh but she never wanted to have sex.
Why didn’t I realize? Why, God, did I have to witness
every vow starve on the ends of wires?

36: This glowing girl? She is interested in me?
The starlings bring each crushed bit of wing into
a bright body, three hundred birds turn in unison
over the rocks of the jetty at Westport,
our feet red and brown in the evening sun.

41: Nausea and waking to a well
that bounds with heartbeats. If this anxiety persists,
I don’t know if it is feasible to continue.
Why did you place me in this terrible workplace?
Do I believe in you enough to blame you?
I cannot reason with the howling and thrashing. I cannot eat.
This is the only time I don’t want to live.
And every morning I wake again.

42: My daughter, pink twisted scream of glass
coming out of her uterus and into our hands.
Thank you, God. I can’t swallow all the passion.
Our boat tips in the swell, tears and milk pour off the deck.
I forgive by virtue of drowning.

45: The screen cracks because of my addiction.
All lies open and darken our new house,
the windows full of flies, the basement and attic
full of rats chewing on our bonds like spies.

46: I will clean and promise again.
Salt into gums, rat feces under nails.
Years of telling the real truth
and tearing the groin from its fixations.
My love, my God, all the soiled covers come off the words.
I did this myself, God. Don’t take credit.

49: Pregnant again?
I don’t know whether to curse you or praise you
for delivering on our wishes so quickly.
Please God, let the child be healthy and whole.
I won’t tell you what I am willing to sacrifice to make that so.
You might just demand it.

 

Scott Ferry helps our Veterans heal as an RN. He has recent work in Cultural Weekly, KYSO Flash, Slippery Elm, Prometheus Dreaming, and many others. He was a finalist in the Write Bloody Chapbook Contest in 2019. His first collection The only thing that makes sense is to grow comes out in January 2020 from Moon Tide Press.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2020 Anthology.

Click here check out the 2019 Anthology:  Trumpet Call; a Swimming with Elephants Anthology available for only $12.95.

Weekly Write: “The Fig Tree” by Romana Iorga

On By awhitetrashpoetIn News, Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

The Fig Tree

We walk down the path with our children.
Dust rises behind us like smoke.

The ground is littered with figs:
small purple bodies
burst open to show their red seeds.

Foreignness blooms quietly inside their wounds.

All these years I wished to be whole,
my fragmented self constantly rearranging
its pieces to suit new surroundings.

Now I find the puzzle all wrong, some pieces
not only missing but clearly irretrievable.

The picture I have in front of my eyes
tells lies. It fractures faces, contorts
limbs, splits bodies in two.

Everything’s backwards: the sky

holds a bodiless earth on its plate; the giant fig trees
point downward like ingrown toenails.

I look at the pattern of leaves above our heads.
Solid branches crisscross this way and that, each
with its purpose – a self-contained universe
to which we cannot belong.

Here are my leaves –

they form passageways of dense shadows,
where the light
travels unencumbered, precise
before hitting the ground and dying
on impact.

Here are my limbs –

they mold the air, they push it
downward,
toward the scattered figs on the ground,
toward these lonely people
scattered among the figs.

 

Originally from Chisinau, Moldova, Romana Iorga is a  Romanian-American poet living in Switzerland. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ruminate, saltfront, Borderlands, as well as on her poetry blog at clayandbranches.com.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2019 Anthology.

Click here check out Parade: Swimming with Elephants Publications Anthology 2018 available for only $10.95.

Weekly Write: “From Certain Distances In Space I Still See My Brother” by Gary Beaumier

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

From Certain Distances In Space I Still See My Brother

Somewhere mother holds you against her breasts in a Chicago flat
— the war winding down —
while she warms a bottle and tests the milk on the tender of her wrist;
“you are my sunshine,” she sings.

Somewhere you sit in a quilted coat
upon a tricycle in front of a red house,
and later still your fastball hisses over
home plate into the strike zone.

Somewhere a man says we all derive from stars,
while a holy person declares we will live forever.

You still succor your fractious babies as you pace a midnight floor.

Only just now a distant planet watches you bend to help a student
or soften your embrace to your wife in the utter dark.

Somehow you glide out of a fifth floor hospital room into a painted twilight,
into streams of cars and trucks and exhaust
as your family holds your emancipated body and rides with you to the edge of life

and somewhere a medical student
peels back what remains of you
to learn the human clockwork.

 

Previously published in Third Wednesday and also The Esthetic Apostle.

In his later years Gary Beaumier has become something of a beachcomber and has self diagnosed with “compulsive walking disorder.” On a number of occasions he has cobbled together wooden sailboats. He is a finalist and semi finalist for the Luminaire Award for several of his poems. He has had three poems published in Flumes Winter 2017 and one poem in Third Wednesday as well as one poem in Chaleur Magazine, The Piltdown Review, The Esthetic Apostle, The Internet Void, an upcoming issue of Raw Arts Review and a recording in Lit_Tapes. He taught poetry in a women’s prison.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2019 Anthology.

Click here check out Parade: Swimming with Elephants Publications Anthology 2018 available for only $10.95.

Weekly Write: “Colic Weather” by Gary Beaumier

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

Colic Weather

The wind was a bombardment
of ice and snow
that morning when
you returned from the barn
to say your old gelding
had died of colic.

Later I winched him
out of his stall
and carefully dragged him
behind the tractor
to a clearing beyond the pasture.

His plush winters coat
could not conceal
the articulated bone over
his once muscled flank
We knew his last days
we’re nearing.

As you cut off a portion
of his tail with
your pocket knife
for a remembrance
you say to me
“ I never partnered better
on any horse then him.
Too bad humans aren’t
that easy.”
You gave me a hard look
as you snapped the knife shut
and walked toward the house.

The ground
yet unfrozen
yields to the back hoe
and I pack
the earth down over him
so coyotes won’t
dig him up.

When I return to the house
you make me tea
as a peace offering
but that night I hear
the yip and cry
of a pack
over your restless sleep
and I worry things
won’t stay buried
…but then I worry
things will.

 

In his later years Gary Beaumier has become something of a beachcomber and has self diagnosed with “compulsive walking disorder.” On a number of occasions he has cobbled together wooden sailboats.

He is a finalist and semi finalist for the Luminaire Award for several of his poems.
He has had three poems published in Flumes Winter 2017 and one poem in Third Wednesday as well as one poem in Chaleur Magazine, The Piltdown Review, The Esthetic Apostle, The Internet Void, an upcoming issue of Raw Arts Review and a recording in Lit_Tapes. He taught poetry in a women’s prison.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2019 Anthology.

Click here check out Parade: Swimming with Elephants Publications Anthology 2018 available for only $10.95.

Weekly Write: “Blue” by Katie Karnehm-Esh

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

Blue

I think of the soft blue sweatsuit you were wearing that warm day in May. Then I think of the way you stared through the bars of the crib, and us. You must be a teenager by now; do you still sleep in a crib? I have a photo of you in my office that one of the students took—do you remember the boy with the red hair?—as I clipped your fingernails through the bars. I can’t look at it very often, and I am grateful that in this photo I cannot see your face. Sometimes my heart still twists up when I think of you, lying on your side staring into a dark tiled room, making occasional noises in neither English nor Mandarin.

Did you know I thought you were a boy the whole afternoon? Blame it on the bowl haircut or the blue sweatsuit. After two weeks in China, I should have known so many of you become androgynous in the orphanage. But I knew the gender of the tiny girl in pink who grinned and stole food. We brought snacks for all the children, and she grabbed the largest hoard. Everyone but you and the infants had a stash, curled their bodies around their plastic-wrapped food. Midway through washing our hands, the water stopped. The German nurse told us the director often turns off the water, that at mealtimes the workers put out food and let the children fend for themselves. Fewer diapers this way. We thought of this when they served us a private cafeteria feast. So much broccoli and pork. So many noodles choking in our throats. The German nurse said, “Eat. If you get upset. I can’t come back to help them.”

I picked you up to help you eat the smashed bananas. The nurses said you would choke and throw up if you ate; they said you only ate milk. I offered a spoonful, slow. Then another, praying it wouldn’t make you sick later.

After I picked you up, there was no reason to put you down. They told me later you were nine years old, but I could not believe you were more than five. You were stiff and quiet in my arms, sometimes seizing into fast shallow breaths. It’s OK, I would tell you, rocking back and forth. We swayed down the green-gray hallway, stopping in the bathroom where two children sat on the floor in a shower stall. One kept laughing and laughing as the water gurgled. The other sat as silent as you. “They protect each other,” one of the nurses told me. The tiny pink grinning girl ran up to me and demanded more snacks. When you started to hyperventilate again, I patted your back. Your spine was like the ridges of a rock wall.

When the German nurse told us we had twenty more minutes, and went back to checking vital signs and bruises, I stepped outside into the courtyard with you. You blinked; so much green and sun. The guard dog in the courtyard barked at us, asking who are you? We walked over to answer. He stared at us from behind a circular fence surrounding a tall tree, and you stared back at him, that furry black thing. Then you leaned your head on my shoulder and sighed.

Something inside me didn’t so much crack as give way. I looked at the white van we’d ridden in from Shenyang, and thought about our flight on Sunday, your crib in the big tiled room, the bananas the workers said you couldn’t eat. If I made a run for the van with you, the German nurse could never come back to feed you.

When she said it was time to go, she didn’t seem angry that it took me a long time to walk you back to your crib and lay you down. You stared out into the room, like you had when I found you. I don’t know what I said. Maybe nothing. I speak English after all. This was not the right place to say I love you or I’ll come back because maybe lying is worse than never having been here. So I whispered goodbye; it’s OK; goodbye; it’s OK while I put you back in your bed and walked away.

Did you know that for months afterwards, I sent emails to check on you? I asked as casually as I could, in a way that someone who is voluntarily childless and in a bad marriage will ask after a child thousands of miles away in an orphanage that does not give up children or feed them. You would never be coming home with me. So when I prayed, it was that you had food. That you had green afternoons and sunshine and a dog barking hello! And that sometimes, when someone rubbed your back and clipped your fingernails and told you it was OK, this would feel like a happy, reoccurring dream you couldn’t quite place.

 

Katie Karnehm-Esh’s background is in creative nonfiction and poetry, with a Ph.D in creative writing from the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Her writing has been published in Whale Road Review, Barren Magazine, The Cresset, The Other Journal, and Windhover. Additionally, she writes a monthly blog for Annesley Writers Forum. Her writing often centers around holistic health, travel, and faith as well as social justice, and she welcomes the opportunity to learn from fellow writers.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2019 Anthology.

Click here check out Parade: Swimming with Elephants Publications Anthology 2018 available for only $10.95.

Weekly Write: “Afternoon” by Holly Painter

On By awhitetrashpoetIn Sunday Poem, Weekly Write

Afternoon

In the afternoon, when the sun lit
the endless fall of dust particles, we
wondered if only we could see them

and kept wondering as we fell asleep,
your limbs wrapped around me,
a barnacle bigger than the boat,

and your fingers twitched
Morse code messages on my back
as you dreamed and then forgot

you were dreaming, until you woke
and the room was grey and you
remembered there is no color

without the light, except behind
my eyelids where my dreams
continued because I didn’t know

the sun had set and taken all the colors with it.

 

Holly Painter lives with her wife and son in Vermont, where she teaches writing and literature at the University of Vermont. Her first full-length book of poetry, Excerpts from a Natural History, was published by Titus Books (2015). Her poetry, fiction, and essays have also been published in literary journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, China, Singapore, and the UK.

 

 

 

“Like”, “Share”, and comment on this poem to nominate it for the Annual Swimming with Elephants Publications 2019 Anthology.

Click here check out Parade: Swimming with Elephants Publications Anthology 2018 available for only $10.95.